Soul Support

Clearly, I have a lot to learn. So much so, in fact, that the issue as I understand it is how to design a curriculum that best supports my study…. Given the limited time available to me. Rickey Henderson just died of pneumonia at 65. I had pneumonia last winter. What are the odds? As I consider my 80th birthday coming up in the summer, I do not have a bucket list of experiences I want to have, places I want to go…..Istanbul, New Orleans, Porto. Everything I want to learn comes to me in conversation and on the page. What is the written word, after all, but conversation without eye contact?

Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash

I’ve narrowed it down to two things that I’d like to learn: how to be a better writer and how to love more generously and I’m considering the possibility that those are two versions of the same thing. A writer, after all, has to love her subject and give it a wide berth. If she writes fiction, she has to learn to love her characters, even the ones who are clueless and self-involved. But I can’t do this on my own. I am on the lookout for teachers. An artist friend in the Berkshires who died in 2021 shared her learning in a unique way. She embraced the inclusion of text into her visual art and made things…cartoons, books, cups, cards, installations that conveyed her observations about mindfulness and love. She made, among other things, slips of paper, like small bookmarks, with simple suggestions written on them. The small pieces of paper were impermanent. You never knew when you would run into one or when one you thought you had in your pocket would disappear. There was no indication that the artist, Deb Koffman, expected them to be saved, only that when you encountered one, you would read it and give it some attention. Sometimes one of Deb’s messages would show up in an old book or in the bottom of your bag. When I unpacked my suitcase in California, mixed in with my socks there was a yellow message from Deb wherever she is that said Suspend Judgment. That’s a good one and easier said than done. All of Deb’s suggestions point to the same wholeness, the same integration.

But you can enter the universe of Deb’s vision from any direction. You might find a slip of paper that says Relax Another Part of Your Body, Stop Struggling or A Miracle is a Shift in Perception. Deb called this Soul Support. We all need a little of that right about now. The heavy lifting that we are called to undertake this holiday season feels more effortful than in years past. It’s not just the usual shopping, wrapping, cooking, cleaning, eating, drinking, making nice and starting all over again. It’s doing all that under a dark cloud. I’m finding that paying attention to the holidays while Suspending Judgment may be the special effort I’m being called to make this year to keep the collective boat afloat.

Today is Christmas and my son’s 53rd birthday and tonight we light the first candle on the chanukah menorah. This little light of mine, I’m going to make it shine as best I can and I hope it shines on you and warms you and brings you peace.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.